Remember the INXS song "Mediate" from their 1987 Kick album? That's one of the few remotely popular music references I can include, since my musical tastes are quite out of step with most music today. But that's a different story. As Sophia Petrillo always used to say when sharing a story about her past on The Golden Girls, "But, I digress."
This week, we discussed collaboration in e-Learning and how it improves the learning experience. I can attest to collaboration improving the distance learning experience, certainly. I'm in my second year of graduate school and most of my classes have been online. In most of those classes, we had to asynchronously collaborate with each other. We had to post responses to discussion questions to the class message board and we had to post responses to at least two other posts before we could consider our participation complete for that class week. Sometimes, I gritted my teeth when I did it, but ultimately I benefited from expanded viewpoints.
I am curious about collaboration in corporate e-Learning environments. I work in a retail training department and we have a very low degree of concurrency (except for when a new course launches) plus we have very low resources for monitoring such collaborative tools as message boards or forums. We tried to do a wiki and it sounded like the answer we had been seeking, but the project ultimately got canceled because there weren't enough resources for monitoring it to make sure that off-topic discussions didn't get started (which is a huge concern for management). Additionally, much of our audience consists of retail store employees who do not have a great deal of time for training. The vast majority of their time is spent selling or completing other tasks; they fit in learning when they get a chance. I'd love to try using collaborative tools, but I think we have to use it with certain segments of our learners and not use it across the board. I wonder if we could do a hosted blog or a wiki with just a select group and see how it goes. We're revamping some of our training efforts in 2008, so we'll see.
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2 comments:
Excellent title - try not to hate. Hey, I just rediscovered INXS the other day. What a great group! I am struggling with how to put together a more collaborative environment for this class - besides chats and forums... i'd like to do some distance oriented projects that involve project management, leadership, motivation, etc.. (collaboration)
I'm glad you liked it! That's a great album.
I didn't collaborate as much this semester with my colleagues as I have with past WebCT courses, and I missed that. It would be great if some of the tools you shared in the list of weblinks from last week's class could be used. My partner recently worked on a group project where they collaborated via Facebook and it turned out well.
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